Futile Devices Scans

“Ever since you came to Bihan City, you’ve spent no small amount of time drinking and fooling around with those two Resident Port Envoys from Qiyun…”

“When did I ever?!”

Young Master Wei, who had not changed expression even after nearly being poisoned to death, immediately showed his feelings all over his face. As though suffering some heaven-shaking injustice, he sprawled beside Yugong Zhaoye’s ear and cried with immense grievance, “Aren’t I busy every day having a secret affair with Your Highness?”

“Before we got together, you often used official socializing as an excuse to go out drinking with your disreputable friends.” Yugong Zhaoye rigorously corrected his wording. “You didn’t even know to avoid being seen. For a while, I thought you and Yuan Tianjing had met too late in life and were planning to swear brotherhood as men of different surnames.”

The great big Wei Fu flopped onto his shoulder and whimpered pitifully.

“When did I ever…”

“You look as though you can get along with anyone, but in reality, you aren’t that warm toward ordinary people. Every time you take the initiative to do something, it means you’re setting a trap. So what exactly did Yuan Tianjing do to deserve your special attention?”

Yugong Zhaoye stroked his face tenderly. The movement was gentle, but his words were blunt and merciless.

“It was only after discovering the true mastermind today that I finally understood. This was something you planned from the very beginning too.”

“…”

Wei Fu let out two dry laughs.

“Haha.”

Even he thought they sounded guilty.

He argued stiffly, “Lord Yuan is warm and hospitable and often invites me to drink. I was simply too embarrassed to refuse him…”

“Whether you deliberately approached him or merely went along with the opportunity, the result was the same: everyone saw that you and Yuan Tianjing were on extremely good terms.”

Even while squeezed together in Wei Fu’s arms, Yugong Zhaoye somehow maintained an expression of perfect calm and continued discussing serious matters.

“One of you is Xiling’s Minister-Regent. The other is Qiyun’s Resident Port Envoy. When the two of you get together, what could you possibly be discussing? How to divide Longsha between you?”

Before Wei Fu could explode, Yugong Zhaoye added in time, “Of course, I wouldn’t suspect you of that. But the King doesn’t understand you the way I do. If he were a mediocre and cowardly ruler, that would be one thing. But so long as he has any ambition at all, how could he not be wary of you?”

Seeing that there was no escaping this time, Wei Fu deceived himself by burying his face in the hollow of Yugong Zhaoye’s shoulder.

“I only wanted to test him a little…”

“Your nerve is truly extraordinary, Wei Shuchen.” Yugong Zhaoye said coldly. “Your method of testing someone is to hand him a knife and see whether he’ll find an opportunity to kill you.”

“…”

Being called by his full name made Wei Fu want very much to flatten himself against the wall.

He hurriedly wagged his tail and acted obedient.

“The King knows where the line is. He wouldn’t really do anything to me. Besides, isn’t Your Highness still here? You’ll definitely protect me, right?”

Those words were practically a blade plunged straight into Yugong Zhaoye’s heart.

He had once believed Bihan City was the safest place. Under Yeguang’s very eyes, no one would dare move against Wei Fu. Yet even a hundred precautions could still miss one opening, and reality had slapped him squarely across the face.

When it happened, he had happened not to be beside Wei Fu.

His Highness rarely laughed bitterly, but when he did, the sound was so cold that it frightened Wei Fu into wagging his invisible tail even harder.

“I wasn’t trying to act recklessly… A subject is supposed to understand his ruler’s intentions and actively help ease his burdens. The King doesn’t want to be controlled by others, so he needed some excuse to make trouble for Qiyun. You could say I volunteered myself…”

He muttered softly, “Otherwise, how am I supposed to stand in the same boat as Longsha?”

Yugong Lie would not allow Noble Consort Qi to become queen, and he could not possibly feel comfortable allowing Wei Fu to monopolize court power either.

Therefore, the safest way for the Minister-Regent to survive was to tuck his tail between his legs, behave himself, and, once his three-year term ended, immediately pack his belongings and leave—exactly as Yugong Zhaoye had warned him in the carriage long ago.

But if Wei Fu was not satisfied merely passing those years in peace and still wanted to accomplish something, then he had to break apart the current situation in which everyone smiled and pretended harmony. Whether through mutual interests or through leverage, whatever he used to pry the situation open, in the end he had to place himself inside the game and personally stand upon the battlefield.

“You are an official of Xiling.”

Yugong Zhaoye was being stabbed into a sieve by every sentence Wei Fu spoke. There was even a faint weakness in his voice that would have been difficult for anyone else to detect.

“Do you really need to scheme this far for Longsha’s ruler?”

Wei Fu lifted his brows in genuine confusion.

“Huh?”

The answer was so natural and obvious that it did not need to be spoken. It already lay completely exposed within his gaze.

But Longsha is your homeland, Your Highness.

The two of them looked at each other in silence for several breaths.

At last, Yugong Zhaoye could no longer bear it.

He pressed the back of Wei Fu’s head, veins rising across his hand as he abruptly exerted force, tipped his own face upward, and kissed him.

He finally understood what Wei Fu had meant by “giving something up” on the night he bared his heart at the old residence in Fengdu.

At the time, Yugong Zhaoye had still been calculating every last detail of their identities and positions, weighing the separation destined to arrive three years later, pitying the moth that flew into the flame while considering himself perfectly rational.

But Xiao Guan had already risked his life for him.

A strange sense of relief even rose in Yugong Zhaoye’s heart.

Fortunately, the dowry wine had been strong enough to go to his head, allowing him to agree to Wei Fu in a moment of impulse before so-called reason could regain control.

Otherwise, right now, he might have regretted it until his intestines turned green. He might have needed to drag Fang Jichuan back overnight and kill him just to make himself feel slightly better.

Otherwise…

How heartbroken would his Xiao Guan have been?

“Mm…”

A laugh like a sigh spilled from Wei Fu’s throat.

At first, Yugong Zhaoye’s rare initiative stunned him into stillness. In the next instant, however, delight blossomed wildly through his heart and he counterattacked, tasting sweetness and immediately clinging to Yugong Zhaoye, refusing to let him escape.

Yugong Zhaoye was chased and bitten by that sharp-toothed fox spirit for so long that his waist and back repeatedly arched away, gradually bending into a supple bow. At last, kissed until both were dizzy and disoriented, they lost their balance and fell together into a pile of plump round cushions.

“Not angry anymore?”

The two of them were hidden intimately in a cramped corner where even the lamplight could not clearly reach.

Wei Fu contentedly wrapped Yugong Zhaoye entirely in his arms and continued pecking him every now and then, kissing from his fluttering lashes down to lips that had taken on a vivid, brilliant color.

That undisguised, uncomplicated adoration was enough to soften the hardest heart in the world.

And Yugong Zhaoye had hardly resisted to begin with.

“It’s not anger…”

He paused.

“No, that’s not right. I am still angry.”

Yugong Zhaoye tilted his face slightly upward to reach Wei Fu’s lips. They touched briefly before parting again.

With lingering fear, he sighed.

“Never do something like this again. Longsha has more internal and external troubles than anyone can count. Even if everything else fails, there is still me. We can always find another way. How many lives do you have to throw away?”

Wei Fu seemed to have been coaxed into an excellent mood. He looked at Yugong Zhaoye with unusual curiosity, his eyes actually sparkling.

“I thought that once you learned the King wasn’t merely spending every day combing his hair and making himself pretty, but was secretly working hard to strengthen his position, you’d feel very reassured.”

“You nearly lost your life. The fact that I’m not jumping into the sea is already impressive. How am I supposed to feel reassured?” Yugong Zhaoye sighed in exasperation. “And the King merely enjoys enhancing his appearance. It’s not as though he dresses himself in outrageous luxury. He’s quite steady in how he conducts himself and handles affairs. There’s no need to worry excessively about that.”

Xiling’s customs were considerably more conservative and solemn than Longsha’s, and Wei Fu had truly had his eyes opened during his half year here.

The chancellors worked in the Eastern Pavilion and set aside a little time every afternoon to drink tea, eat snacks, and trade strange stories from the various yamen. Some of those stories were hardly suitable for an unmarried young man like Wei Fu to hear. Yet those experienced older men also spent every day telling him not to waste his good looks, urging him to dress himself up while he was still young and wear brighter colors. Otherwise, they claimed, once he passed twenty-five he would have to rely on face powder just to maintain a fair complexion.

They made Wei Fu sound like a tender little cabbage growing wild in a field—something that had to be eaten quickly before it grew old.

Originally, Wei Fu had not taken their remarks seriously.

Hearing Yugong Zhaoye say this, however, he suddenly became nervous.

“So Your Highness thinks it would be better if I dressed up a little?”

Yugong Zhaoye thought, What does that have to do with anything? With a mind that leaps from one subject to another like this, is Longsha really going to be safe in your hands?

Still, he raised his eyes and looked Wei Fu up and down, then tapped the center of his brow with one fingertip.

“I don’t have any particular preference. If I had to choose, I like you like this.”

For an instant, Yugong Zhaoye could practically see a giant cluster of little pink flowers bloom behind Wei Fu.

Immediately afterward, the delighted fox spirit pressed him onto the couch and kissed him several times in succession.

There was hardly any desire in it.

Wei Fu simply liked him so much he had no idea what to do with himself, so he wanted to stay pressed close and nuzzle him endlessly.

“Your Highness is so…”

He leaned intimately beside Yugong Zhaoye’s pale ear, faintly flushed pink, as though trying to find the right words.

In the end, he only laughed softly.

“So what?”

Yugong Zhaoye’s pale amber eyes seemed immersed in a clear spring scattered with peach blossoms. He narrowed them comfortably. His double eyelids and the tails of his eyes joined into an extraordinarily beautiful upward curve.

Because he was lying down and his collar had fallen open, the small mole on his neck had come into view, rising and falling faintly with each breath.

Against such pale skin, that single mark became especially striking.

It might as well have been brightly announcing:

Bite here.

Wei Fu did not know how to describe Yugong Zhaoye’s current state.

It seemed somewhat different from usual, yet the difference was incredibly subtle.

Almost as though…

He had suddenly awakened to desire.

It was not that Yugong Zhaoye had been completely oblivious before. He was simply accustomed to restraining his emotions. Although he always appeared detached, distant, and rarely took the initiative, he was actually extraordinarily indulgent toward Wei Fu and yielded to him in almost everything.

Yet whether it was tolerance or pampering, both were still a kind of giving from above.

Someone who desired nothing was impossible to conquer.

Yugong Zhaoye was willing to indulge Wei Fu’s foolishness, willing to jump into the river with him and come out soaked together, but he would never completely sink beneath the water himself.

Wei Fu was patient.

He intended to remain in this river for the rest of his life anyway. Someday he would surely soak the stone soft and make the wood blossom.

But that day seemed to have arrived much sooner than expected.

He had never seen wood blossom before.

For a moment, he was dazzled into a stupor.

The silver-tongued Chancellor Wei suddenly ran out of words. After struggling for quite a while, he finally said softly, slightly embarrassed:

“Your Highness is so good to me today…”

This counts as good?

Am I usually that harsh on him?

An indescribable feeling rose inside Yugong Zhaoye.

He touched Wei Fu’s face.

“Stop changing the subject. Did you remember what I just told you? No matter what happens in the future, protect yourself first. Never trade your life for anything.”

“I know.” Wei Fu laughed and lowered his head to kiss him. “I’ll be careful. I won’t make Your Highness worry…”

This foolish child still doesn’t understand.

Yugong Zhaoye simply clasped Wei Fu’s hand and pressed it against Wei Fu’s own chest, letting the heartbeat thump steadily against his palm.

“My heartache doesn’t count for anything, Xiao Guan.”

“No matter how beautiful the words sound, when pain falls upon your body, I can’t bear even the smallest part of it for you.”

“The most important person is you. That is why I want you to cherish yourself. Not for your father and mother, not for your ruler or your brothers, and not for me.”

“Only for yourself.”

“Love yourself a little more. Just treat it as loving me. Alright?”

For someone with Yugong Zhaoye’s personality, those words already amounted to tearing open his chest and laying his heart bare.

An assassin who had spent years licking blood from the edge of a blade was earnestly begging a sheltered civil official who had barely been touched by wind or rain to treasure his own life.

The natural order itself seemed turned upside down.

And yet—

Those words felt strangely familiar.

Because what happened at fifteen had been carved too deeply into his bones, and because Wei Fu’s memory was so good, his thoughts raced backward in an instant to that pitch-black underground place where no daylight could reach.

At the edge of life and death, the young assassin he had met by chance had also clutched him exactly like this, desperately and hoarsely stopping him from jumping over the cliff.

Perhaps every plea Yugong Zhaoye had ever made in his entire life had been used on Wei Fu.

“…”

Once that intimidating outer layer of feathers was peeled aside, hidden within was still the Xiao Guan who had not improved at all after all these years.

Wei Fu completely turned back into a mute.

Avoiding Yugong Zhaoye’s gaze, he buried his face in the warmth of his neck and made a sound somewhere between crying and laughing.

Yugong Zhaoye relaxed instead.

He wrapped an arm around Wei Fu’s trembling back, soothed him with gentle strokes, then turned his head and placed a light kiss against his raven-black hair.

“Will you listen obediently?”

From the hollow of his neck came a tearful:

“Mhm.”

Yugong Zhaoye laughed softly.

“Then come here.”